


Way Down We Go

by onearmedmechanic



Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Attempted Murder, Curses, Guns, Jack is a witch hunter, M/M, NSFW, Rhys is a witch, Road Trips, Witch AU, fake relationships, losing limbs, modern witches, vengeance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-01-22 13:51:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12483108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onearmedmechanic/pseuds/onearmedmechanic
Summary: Jack had the little shit in his sights. He knew there was a witch in this area. All the signs pointed to it. He was so damn close he could taste it, but whoever this was, was very good at hiding. Jack glowered at his journal, snapping the book shut as he heard the door open, Rhys was home."Honey, I brought home dinner!"





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: I reformatted the first chapter to include the spaces between paragraphs so it doesn't look like one big clump

What woke Rhys up was the silence. 

Like driving in the rain when you pass under an overhang and there are a few solid moments of silence and then everything comes crashing back down somehow harder than it did before. 

He had been dating Jack Lawrence for nearly two months, he was surprised that it had taken him this long to figure it out. 

Either Rhys was very good at lying or Jack just wasn't as good as he thought he was. 

Jacks silhouette slipped over the bed where Rhys was sleeping alone. The soft light from the hallway cascading over the bed covers. 

Nothing moved. no birds, no trees. Just silence. 

 

Rhys was up and out of the bed as the first shotgun blast destroyed the headboard and the pillow where Rhys had been laying exploded in a shower of downy feathers. 

“Jack!” Rhys squawked as he dodged another shotgun blast. “Are you fucking crazy?!” Rhys did his best to sound normal. 

Like a normal human boyfriend who's equally normal human boyfriend just turned Son of Sam on him for no reason. 

Except Rhys wasn't human and he knew exactly why Jack was doing this. 

“You thought you could trick me?” Jack reloaded as Rhys ran past him, shoving against Jack's muscular chest as his bare feet padded on the hardwood floor. 

He didn't want to die today. 

“You can run but you can't hide, Rhys!” Jack taunted, his heavy boots thudding on the floor. Rhys ran to the kitchen, pulling a knife out of the block and brandishing it out in front of him. 

He should use his magic but that would just prove Jack right  _ and  _ make it impossible for him to hide again. 

“I know what you are, kiddo. You can't hide from me.” Rhys had ducked into the laundry room and was cowering, tucked nimbly between the wall and the washer. 

“Here kitty kitty,” Jack purred. “Come out come out wherever you are.” Jack was right outside the door. His heavy boots were the only sound above the pounding of Rhys’ own heart. 

_ Please don't let me die like this.  _ Rhys sent a silent prayer up to anyone who was listening. 

He must not have gotten through because the doors were ripped off of the laundry room with enough force to make Rhys scream. The young witch was torn from his hiding spot by his hair, pulling a blood curdling shriek from him. 

He swiped out blindly catching Jacks forearm which made the man yell. He grabbed Rhys by the throat with a big hand and slammed him against the wall hard making him drop the knife. 

“Jack  _ please!”  _ Rhys screamed, terrified beyond merit. “I'm sorry! I’m sorry!” 

“You really thought i wouldn't find out?” Jack slammed him against the wall again with enough force to rattle the house. “How stupid can you be, Rhysie?” Jack had a knife of his own and it was pressed against Rhys’ pale throat. It was silver so the metal seared his flesh a little. Rhys wasn't full blood so it only had half the effect but is was still painful. 

“I mean i thought your kind was supposed to be smart. But you… you crawled right into bed with the enemy.” Jack smirked, teasingly. There was no way in hell the last thing Rhys was going to see before he died was the smug smirk of his goddamned boyfriend. 

“You let me.” Rhys quipped back. Jack may have figured him out but it took the hunter at the very least 2 months before he realized he had been fucking a witch. 

“You little shit. Do you really think i believed your lies?” Jack ground out the words through his teeth. 

Rhys had only seen him this mad once. 

It had scared him, shaken Rhys to the bone as the vision dissipated. 

Anger and rage pouring out of him and now that carnage was directed at him. 

“They weren't lies.” Rhys closed his eyes. 

“What?” Jack snapped, only seconds away from filleting him open and leaving him to bleed out on his living room floor. 

“They weren't lies. Not all of them.” Rhys opened his eyes to look at Jack. 

Rhys had know this whole time what Jack was. But there was a side of him that was so real, so… soft. He had known his end would come at the barrel of Jack's gun and he had fallen in love anyways. 

“Then what was it?” 

“I needed your help.” Rhys leveled his gaze with Jack. 

“Oh that’s rich baby, even from you.” 

“I'm telling the truth Jack. Kill me if you want but hear me out first.” Rhys’ eyes were big and sad, something made Jack stop. 

Dammit, this dumb kid had done a damn good job of a cover. Two fucking months of trying to track down the witch in this area and he had been tucked right under Jack’s nose. Shit, he’d been sleeping in Jack’s bed, making dinner, walking jacks fucking dog, and he hadn’t known. Rhys was sweet, well the person Jack thought rhys was, was sweet. Soft, innocent. No hint of a killer in him. But they were all killers. All of them. This one was no different. 

Jack matched his gaze with Rhys. they were close enough that Jack could feel the boys little panicked breaths on his cheek, eye to eye. blue and green on blue and brown. 

_ This is why you don’t get involved with people. _ The little voice in his head told him.  _ They’ll betray you. Everyone has.  _ Jack couldn’t help but remember the last time they were this close. 

Two days ago, pressed down in the bed, Rhys breathing Jack's name like he lived for it, those eyes, full of life and lust. That couldn’t have been a lie. 

He shouldn’t have said it. He should have slit Rhys’ throat right there, but there was something in those eyes. Something that scared jack. Rhys was ready to die. Rhys was going to  _ let  _ Jack kill him. 

“Fine. talk.” Jack lowered the knife, still ready to strike when Rhys breathed out and pressed his thumb between Jack’s eyebrows. 

Then the whole world was tilting and jack was on his back on the floor.

The pain of hitting the floor seemed like a distant memory instead what he saw in front of him was the only thing in his field of vision. 

 

It was Rhys. he looked different. He was a few inches shorter, his hair was dirty and long and fell in his eyes. God he couldn’t be older than 20 and he was screaming. 

Not the terrified shriek that Jack had pulled out of him only moments earlier but true horror and pain. His hand was clenched around what was left of his arm, blood seeping through his fingers and staining his hoodie a dark color, it was dripping onto the very expensive rug he was kneeling on. 

“Have we learned our lesson yet?” a knobbly hand picked up his chin, forcing his eyes up. Rhys grit his teeth, trying to look up through his tears. 

Jack looked around the room, trying to move from where he was standing but it was as if he was watching a film in 3d. The room was real around him and the scene moved but he couldn’t do anything. 

“Are you going to tell me what i want to hear?” Jack knew that voice. 

“I-i-i can’t find them. I d-don’t know where else to look.” Rhys sounded so young, so scared. “Please- please I'm sorry.” 

“Then you’ll just have to keep trying.” Jack looked up at the face of pure evil. 

Pointed nose, high cheekbones and tiny beady eyes that could pierce right through your soul.

Harold Tassiter. 

“Take him away.” Tassiter dropped Rhys’ chin, leaving him panting on the floor. “Only two seers in this country and you bring me the broken one.” there was someone that Jack had never seen before. Must have been one of tassiters hands. 

The sound of those needle-like fingers snapping was louder than a gunshot and before said unnamed minion could meet his grisly demise, Jack woke up. 

Eyes opening to stare up at Rhys’ ceiling fan. 

 

“How do you feel?” a soft voice said. Bringing Jack back to reality. turning his head felt like climbing up a mountain but there was a pair of hands easing him into a sitting position and pressing a cup of warm tea to his lips. 

“Like i got hit by a fucking truck.” Jack ground out, pushing the mug away and reaching for his shotgun. 

“I took the bullets out.” Rhys said, his voice was low. Jack turned to look at Rhys who was holding Jacks bag of shotgun shells. “Here.” Rhys handed him the bag, “I just didn’t want you to try to shoot my while you were in the middle of… that.” Rhys was still in his pj’s, sitting back on his ankles on the floor next to Jack. He looked perfectly non-threatening, in fact he almost looked cute. 

“What the fuck did you do to me?” Jack asked, taking the bag but not reloading his gun. 

“I made you have a vision.” Rhys held the mug out to jack who looked at it like it was full of caterpillars. 

Rhys snorted, almost amused. “It’s not poison, Jack. Its green tea with honey. It’ll make you feel better.” 

“Why?” Jack took it but kept a careful eye on Rhys. that was a loaded question. Why tea? Why was Rhys trying to take care of Jack? Why wasn’t he dead? 

“Because having a vision sucks and if i wanted to poison you then i would have done it a long time ago.” Rhys picked the pillow that he had laid under Jack’s head and put it back on the couch. 

“Okay so it was a vision, but Why? And how?” 

“Well… i'm a seer. And sometimes i can give people visions. Like a teaser trailer. I showed you that because we’re on the same side. I want Tassiter dead just as much as you do.” Rhys fidgeted, smoothing down a lock of straight hair. 

“Pffft. Yeah right.” Jack took a sip of the tea. He could see the little pang of hurt in rhys’ eyes as he was dismissed. “And what makes you think that I want the same thing you do?” 

“Angel.” Rhys let the word fill the room around him.

Suddenly rhys was pinned on his back with Jack’s full weight on top of him, hands around his throat. 

“How did you know about her?” Jack's eyes were lit like fire, a roiling volcano behind a glass sea of blue and green. “ _ Nobody _ knows about her.” 

“I saw it.” Rhys wheezed, his fingers wrapped around Jack's wrist but he wasn't struggling. “I-i thought you w-would help me…” His voice cracked as Jack's grip tightened “I had to try. He ruined my life… y-you were my l-last chance... you’re a  _ hero… _ ” Rhys’ vision was starting to blacken when the pressure released. 

Rhys started coughing, letting air fill his lungs again. 

“A hero huh?” Jack sat back on Rhys’ thighs. “So when were you going to bring this up, kitten? Hey could you pick up some milk, also i'm a witch and i need your help to hunt down our mutual enemy? Not a real foolproof plan, kiddo.” 

“Well i'm not much of a forward thinker. But going around killing any witch you find on the street was only making Tassiter harder to find.” Rhys cracked a smile. “I had to intervene somehow.” 

“So what are you trying to offer me here?” Jack crossed his arms. 

“You’re a witch hunter, so you have guns and knives that can kill dark witches, and i know how to get you to them without arousing suspicion.” 

“Dark witches?” Jack arched an eyebrow. 

“Mhmm.” Rhys nodded, looking up at Jack. “Not all witches are killers, babe. But there are some killers and most of them work for Tassiter.” 

“So what are you?” Jack had learned more in the last ten minutes than he had in two years and he was honestly interested in more.

“I'm a half-blood and a seer. Which puts me on most of the dark witches shit-lists because they hate the half breeds. But they can’t kill me because seers are mostly extinct and they need me.” Rhys kept talking, his breath evening out. “There are light witches too, they want Tassiter stopped but we don’t have the means to do that.” 

“Which is why you need me.”

“The high council says we should handle this internally but at least half of them work for tassiter. Our way of life is being killed because of that monster. No one is safe.” Rhys trailed off, looking up at Jack. “You've taken out the most dark witches than any hunter on record.” Rhys gave Jack that little ego boost because fake dating someone for two months can teach you a little bit about what works and what doesn’t.

Rhys didn’t know what Jack was going to say next but suddenly Jack was all over him, kissing him, pinning his wrists to the floor and shoving his tongue into Rhys’ mouth. 

Rhys moaned in surprise and as Jack pulled away rhys failed to resist chasing his lips. 

“Lie to me again… and I’ll fucking kill you.” 

“I wouldn’t expect anything less, handsome.” Rhys smiled and kissed the hunter again, weaving his arms around the older man’s neck. “Does this mean we aren’t breaking up?” Rhys’ eyes were hopeful, like he had been on the brink of devastation and Jack held the scales in his hand. He was totally at Jack’s mercy. It looked good on him. 

“I hate messy goodbyes.” Jack grinned against his neck, asserting his decision with a pointed bite to the young man’s neck causing him to moan in agreement.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack didn’t like being made to look like a fool and finding out that the witch he had spent so much time searching for had Jack eating out of his palm was a blow to his ego. But Rhys was right, they had a common enemy. And Rhys had done a damn good job of a cover because Jack had actually fallen for him. Maybe not ass over tea kettle in love, but who was he to resist a flutter of dark lashes and a pair of long legs?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally finished! You guys asked for more chapters, so here it is! this chapter is pretty graphic so heed the warnings

Rhys was laying in bed a thousand miles away from his old life, tucked carefully against Jack's chest. It wasn't the most comfortable bed in the world but it didn't really matter, he’d slept on worse. 

The lights outside of the motel flickered, lightly before the door was kicked in with a loud bang sending Rhys scrambling out from under the covers and falling onto the floor. 

“You're late.” Jack croaked, tucking away his pistol. 

“You need to be lighter on your feet, old man.” The intruder laughed in a smoky female voice as Rhys tried to get his heart to calm down. Nisha flicked on the lights and one of the light bulbs closest to Rhys exploded. 

“Yeah, he does that sometimes.” Jack chuckled as he helped the startled witch to his feet. “You should have seen how many light bulbs we lose when he-” 

“Jack!” Rhys scolded cutting off the very lewd comment. Nisha laughed and Rhys frowned at Jack letting out an annoyed huff. “Don’t you hunters know how to knock like a normal person?” 

“Well, Jackie. You never said he was cute.” the lady hunters eyes swept appreciatively over Rhys. Rhys turned a cute shade of pink when he realized that he was standing in front of the two of them in his t-shirt and boxers. 

“Sure I did. You weren’t listening.” Jack handed Rhys his pants who took them with a pout. Wilhelm appeared in the doorway as Jack zipped up his duffel. 

“This him?” The huge man grumbled as he eyed Rhys. “He looks a little skinny to be a witch.” Wilhelm arched a thick eyebrow. 

“Wilhelm and Nisha meet Rhys.” Jack handed the kid his flannel and Rhys shrugged it on, noticing the way that the two hunters eyes caught on his enchanted arm.

“It’s nice to meet both of you.” Rhys picked up his own small backpack and followed them out to the truck.

It was close to one am and Rhys was still tired so after climbing into the cab of the truck, he tucked himself up against Jack and was asleep before they pulled out of the parking lot. 

“Rhysie you want a coffee?” Rhys was being shaken awake by a broad hand and he picked his head up off of the leather seat with a small grumble. 

“Where are we?” Rhys asked, his hair was sticking up in every direction and it was honestly kind of cute. 

“Just outside of Amarillo.” Jack ruffled his hair, though it did nothing to tame the wild bird's nest Rhys was currently sporting on his head. 

“Texas?” 

“Yeah, Texas babe.” 

Rhys let out a long groan, scrubbed a hand over his face and got out of the cab. 

“Whoa, grumpy kitten.” Jack chuckled as Rhys’ boots landed lightly on the dusty pavement. 

“Yeah, Texas and I aren’t good friends.” Rhys pushed a hand through his hair. He needed a shower already, he could feel the friggin’ dust clinging to his skin. 

“I hope you’re going to share with the class,” Nisha smirked, her dark purple lips pulling pearly teeth. She looked like she could have been a demon in another life. Or an incubus. 

“Long story short there was a lot of dust, a bar fight and I almost got arrested. Twice.” Rhys deadpanned as they made their way to the empty parking lot to the 24-hour diner. 

Jack held the door open for the group to pour into the little diner. The night was still clinging to the sky and refusing to let go even as the sun forced its way over the desert landscape, casting a soft baby pink glow on the world around them. Rhys walked in and Jack's hand landed on the back of his neck. It was a sign of possession, not only to the sparse patrons of the diner but to any other hunters. 

Rhys didn't mind it, he knew what he was getting into. 

Nisha chose a booth near the corner of the restaurant, it was near enough one of the side exits but well enough out of the way that they could enjoy their food in peace. Rhys tagged along well enough with the little band of hunters, sliding into the inside of the booth so Jack could perch on the outside. A habit is borne of both paranoia and protection. 

“Good-mornin'! What can I start Y'all off with?” A perky waitress appeared from the back with a pitcher of coffee and blonde hair piled on top of her head in something that vaguely resembled a beehive.

In fact, the entire place looked like it had been ripped straight from a 1950’s themed sitcom. All Rhys could do was hope that they were just background characters, passing through and not part of the main storyline. 

“Coffee,” Nisha ordered, curtly and in in no mood to be polite. Wilhelm mirrored her sentiment with a wordless grunt and a nod. 

“Coffee for me and the little one here too, sweetheart.” Jack gestured to him and Rhys who was almost still too tired to speak, he just nodded in agreement. When the waitress’s eyes landed on Rhys she faltered, her gaze shifting ever so slightly. Almost unnoticeable. 

“You have the most beautiful eyes, sugar.” She smirked and just like that the look was gone. 

Rhys thought nothing of it, he did have pretty eyes. They were heterochromatic, just like Jack’s. He’d been getting compliments about them all his life. 

“Alrighty, coffees all around. Y’all give me a holler when you’re ready to order,” She smiled again, a little too chipper for 5:30 am. She inverted their little white cups and filled them with coffee before disappearing into the back. 

The cook returned, he was a stout man with a bald spot and a potbelly but he didn’t try and talk to them. 

“So what are we doing in Texas?” Rhys asked, hoping it was a lead on Tassiter. 

“An old contact of Nisha’s got wind of a witch operation in Odessa. There aren’t any ties to Tassiter yet, but if the intel is correct then they’re a supply depot and they should have a list of names connecting us to Tassiter’s people.” Jack reported pulling out his map where he had the cross sections of the roads circled. 

Rhys recognized the intersection. 

“The building itself is a bar, a witch bar with the depot center hidden underneath the building.” Nisha nodded, taking a sip of her coffee. 

“Is it called The Prophecy?” Rhys questioned. 

“How did you know?” Nisha looked mostly intrigued and a little disturbed. 

“I have a friend that works there, She runs the place. I could get us in if you want.” Rhys provided, with a little smile and a sip of coffee. “She’s an oracle.” 

“Like you?” Jack arched an eyebrow.

“No, I'm a seer.” Rhys laughed a little. “Oracles read the future and peoples minds. I can only see things that are happening in the present.” As he was saying this the hairs on the back of his neck raised up. Rhys looked around, suddenly on edge. Something was watching them. 

Rhys grabbed a handful of napkins and pulling a pen out of his pocket he quickly scrawled an equilateral triangle and then drew an eye in the middle of it and carefully drew a sigil in the iris of the eye, passing them out to Nisha, Wilhelm and Jack who were all looking at him like he was crazy. 

“Put it in your pocket, something’s here and it’s watching us,” he whispered and then gave a brief incantation to activate the sigils. 

They heard something fall in the back of the diner, like the sound of a cup being dropped onto the checkered linoleum. 

“You okay back there, Donna?” the cook shouted to the back. 

“Sorry Cal! I’m just all kinds of clumsy this morning.” Donna called back and trotted back out with a tray 

“This is going to sound weird, but I don’t think we should stay for breakfast,” Rhys whispered quietly to the rest of the group. 

“What’s the matter, kiddo?” Jack frowned at Rhys, “You having a vision or something?” 

“I just have this weird feeling. Like something is watching us.” Rhys chewed on his bottom lip, his pretty eyes darting around nervously. 

“Relax, kitten. We won’t let anything happen to you.”

“It’s not me I'm worried about, Jack,” Rhys admitted quietly. “The people who want to hurt me… will keep me alive at all costs, and kill anyone who gets in their way. If they don't get killed first.” 

“You got a bounty on your head, sweetheart?” Nisha leaned across the table, a grin pulling on her dark purple lips. 

“Sort of.” Rhys tucked back a lock of stray hair only for it to flop back into place as if nothing had happened. “As a seer, I can see things that are happening in the present as well as things that happened in the past, it’s different than being an oracle. I can see things, people, what they’ve done, what they’re doing. It makes it easy to spy on people. It’s how I knew where to find Jack and how to convince him to help me.” Rhys looked over at his not-so-fake boyfriend with a smirk and a playful nudge. 

“More like this kid spent two-months playing housewife and running me in circles looking for the witch that was sleeping in my own damn bed.” Jack gave Rhys a grin of his own, though his voice had a soft resentful edge. 

Jack didn’t like being made to look like a fool and finding out that the witch he had spent so much time searching for had Jack eating out of his palm was a blow to his ego. But Rhys was right, they had a common enemy. And Rhys had done a damn good job of a cover because Jack had actually fallen for him. Maybe not ass over tea kettle in love, but who was he to resist a flutter of dark lashes and a pair of long legs? He was just thinking with his dick. At least that’s what he kept telling himself. 

“Unlike an oracle, my predictions are like 99.9% accurate, and I can’t tell you your fortune,” Rhys looked down at a little pile of sugar that had spilled when he was doctoring his coffee, he drew a line through the little shimmery pile with his index finger, “and most of the time my visions aren’t happy ones.” 

“Y’all ready to order?” The waitress appeared out of nowhere and gave Rhys a little fright, “Whoa, jumpy lil fella. Didn’t mean to scare ya, honey.” She smiled a little too wide. 

“That’s okay, it’s just early.” Rhys brushed it off, the hairs on the back of his neck rising again. He tried to shake off this nervous feeling, but something wasn’t right about Donna. He could tell. 

“Well, now that you mention it, darlin’ I'm starving. I’ll have the Cattle Rancher’s breakfast with an extra side of bacon if you don’t mind.” Jack grinned up at her and the rest of them rattled off their orders. 

“I’ll have that right out to ya,” She nodded and fluttered off to hand the orders to Cal before disappearing into the back again. 

The conversation drifted away from Rhys, and he stopped paying attention as a tumbleweed drifted past his window, bouncing through the parking lot like it didn’t have a care in the world. It rolled with the wind along this little sliver of Texan landscape. 

The sun was awake now, the remnants of the sunrise were only pink and orange whispers against a solid blue sky that stretched towards infinity. Rhys’ eyes drifted back towards the tumbleweed as it did its bounce and just as it was about to hit the pavement it froze in mid-air. 

Rhys frowned. There was nothing. No movement, the world was suddenly silent. There was no sound of frying bacon on the griddle and no conversation from Jack and Nisha. In fact, when he looked at the three of them they were frozen too, just like the tumbleweed. Jack with his mouth hanging open mid-sentence and Nisha with a wry smile on her lips. 

Rhys got out of the booth, confusion and dread stirring in his gut when a flicker of movement caught his eye, he turned to look as Donna came out of the back room, the only thing except for him that wasn’t frozen. 

“I knew it,” She said, “It was those eyes. You’re a witch.” 

“What kind of spell is this?” Rhys questioned. 

“A little time spell, it's come in quite handy. Easy to get caught up on the lunch rush when you have infinite time to get things done.” Donna crossed her arms. “But that's not why I cast it this time.” 

“Why did you cast it?” Rhys frowned. This was wrong, playing with time was bad magic. 

“Look at you, so full of questions.” Donna gave a curt laugh, “But since it’s just us here, I guess I’ll tell you. You have something that I want. Something I’ve wanted for a long time. I never thought I was lucky enough to get a seer into my little trap, figured they could spot me from a hundred miles away.” She took a step towards Rhys, who moved back instinctively, “But you, you came with a pack of hunters. Now isn’t that strange? The kind of strange that betrays our entire way of life.” 

“Oh, you mean like fucking with time?” Rhys snapped, there were rules against this kind of thing for a reason if the high council- 

He was cut off when Donna moved forwards so fast she looked like a simple streak of color in the otherwise unmoving background. “Watch your language. Or I won’t just take your eyes.” 

Rhys’ eyes widened as the hand around his throat tightened, claw-like fingernails sharpening as the non-existent seconds ticked past, as that happened something in Donna's face flickered. She had been pretty before, in a homey, southern hospitality way but she seemed to do de-age before Rhys’ eyes and as she did her features grew sharper, ears pointing, teeth elongating to form a mouthful of fangs, her hair tumbled from her heard in golden cascades, falling out of the messy pile of hair on top of her head. 

Rhys had seen this creature only once, and it was in a book. She was a Sidhe. Magic users that haunted Celtic myth, coloring them with tragedy and bloodshed. They were fae by origin but after so much dark magic had corrupted them it had turned them into something else entirely, beautiful and dangerous. They lived off of the magics of others, greed was their folly. 

Rhys locked eyes with the Sidhe and whispered a few a Celtic words as was the nature of her magics, “Tosaigh arís.” 

As quickly as it had stopped, time restarted and Jack finished his joke before noticing the Sidhe who had Rhys by the throat and by that time the three of them sprung into action, providing enough of a distraction for Rhys to pull out of her grip. 

“No!! You little bitch.” She screeched. 

“What the fuck?” Jack shouted as he pulled out his gun and fired it into her chest. The shots knocked her back but she didn’t go down. Just picked herself up and continued to advance towards the group, Rhys fell back so stand beside Jack. 

“Guns won’t work on her, Jack,” Rhys said, still trying to catch his breath. Rhys tried to remember what he had learned about Sidhe. They were fae, pure magical beings that had been corrupted. 

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, sugarplum.” Donna grinned with a crooked smile that was too sharp to be friendly. “You can give me your seer eyes or I can rip them from your skull while you’re still alive.” She screeched with a voice like nails on a chalkboard as Nisha fired another round into her. 

Pure magic. Rhys’ wheels were spinning in his head. Sidhe were pure magic. That meant that they were vulnerable to humanity. It would destroy them. 

“You want him? Come and get him, bitch.” Jack snarled he pushed Rhys bodily behind him. That’s when Rhys spied jacks silver knife in its holster. 

“You don’t want my eyes, Donna,” Rhys said calmly. “I'm part human. They won’t work for you.” She let out an angry hiss and launched towards him, her claws reaching out for Jack’s throat. 

Without knowing what he was doing Rhys sprung into action, pulling Jack’s knife from its holster and giving his boyfriend a quick slash on the arm, not too deep but enough to coat the silver knife in Jack’s human blood and bury the knife in her sternum. 

Donna gave an inhuman shriek and backed away from Rhys who pulled the knife out. Donna stumbled backward, clawing at her would as if she could tear the human blood from her body. They watched as her form decayed, almost as if time was catching up with her. She gave one last scream that broke all of the windows in the diner. The four of them flinched as the glass exploded everywhere. 

She fell backward dead, with a gaping wound in her chest. With her spell broken, the diner around them began to decay as if it had been abandoned for 20 years. Even the cook seemed to decay until he was only a skeleton, only another pawn in the Sidhe’s game. 

“Well, what are we going to do with this?” Nisha huffed, planting her hands on her hips with a frown as she looked down at the body. “We can’t just leave it here.” 

Rhys let out a small laugh before whispering a few words to himself. A small string of luminescent green light escaped his lips as they watched the sliver of green light coil around the body like a snake and it disappeared before their eyes, dissolving the body into little flecks of dust that floated out the broken windows. 

“We should keep him around.” Nisha grinned and slung her arm over Rhys’ shoulder. Jack seemed to be stunned at the quick thinking of the little witch. 

“What was that?” Wilhelm grumbled. 

“A Sidhe. A twisted offspring of a fairy that can bend time to do her bidding and absorbs the powers of other magic users. She tried to take my eyes but since I’m half human using them would have killed her.” Rhys explained as he went over to Jack whose arm was still bleeding. “Sorry about that. I wasn’t sure I had enough human in me to kill her.” 

“You want some more human in you?” Jack grinned, pleased at having the joke so expertly set up for him. Rhys groaned but smiled at his boyfriend. 

“Get a room you two.” Nisha cackled. Rhys opened his mouth to say something when a dizzying feeling overcame him. He grabbed onto Jack’s sleeve but his fingers were weak and he fell to the floor as the vision overcame him. 


End file.
